The Christmas Wren
Electra Rhodes
It’s Christmas Day when I find the wren’s body in the frost-rimed gutter at the edge of the lane. Later, I’ll regret that my first thought was that in custom and folklore the wren had died a day too soon.
The practice is a bit of typical human bait and switch – on the 26th December, St Stephen’s Day, boys would hunt and kill a wren; the tiny bird’s death standing in for ours in a ritualised sacrifice that lamented all the wrongs we were doing to nature. There are songs and stories and a chunky body of conflicting research that round out the lore.
I scoop the little bird into the palms of my hands and cup him like water in the desert: his backstitch eye is closed against the light; his still warm body a short breath away from life.
I don’t know if it is the same wren who has accompanied my local pilgrimage each Sunday morning for the last six months, his fluttered progress along the hedgerow an accompaniment to my thoughts, his insistent call a punctuation, full stop, new idea, come along. I listen to a silence that he used to fill.
A car slows and nudges past me along the holloway. A metre of depth takes 300 years to form and this road takes me back to when Wrenboys first hunted this tiny bird in the 1720s in a burst of defiant new custom and performative bravado. All I wish is that we could go back in time half an hour.
A Christmas celebration with all its natality seems emptied of meaning and still holding him as carefully as any magi’s gift, I turn on my heel to go back home.
Then, as if it’s Easter and not the nativity, the wren stirs in the cave of my hands, pecks me hard, and when I roll back my thumbs to open his temporary tomb, he eyes me beadily and then flies away.
I am as stunned as he was.
At home, I re-read my books on birding behaviour and folklore, and learn the wren has a history of playing dead and subsequent resurrection.
I can still feel the soft struggle of feathers and scratch of its claws as it used my hands as a launchpad. From the books’ multiple accounts, I am only the most recent would-be wren-retriever to be surprised by joy in this way.
Wren Watercolour by Kerrie Ann Gardner
https://kerrieanngardner.co.uk/
